“What ostrich? What are you talking about?”
Sam looked like nothing more than a scared, barely legal-aged kid, and Seth slammed the car door closed, a disturbing uncertainty simmering inside him.
He wanted to believe that Sam was guilty. It made everything so neat and clean. Bad guy caught, case closed and no more danger of horrendous live burials to the women in Amber Lake, no more danger to Tamara.
Desperately, he wanted it to be Sam, but there was just a sliver of uncertainty in his mind about the kid’s guilt. It was just a gut feeling that he hoped was wrong. But when he’d asked Sam about the ostrich, Sam’s look of total incomprehension had appeared so genuine.
By the time he walked back to Atkins, it was time to get closer and check out who, exactly, was buried in this latest murder. “I was thinking earlier that hopefully there aren’t bodies out here that we don’t know about,” Seth said as they walked.
“Bite your tongue,” Atkins replied and a deep sigh escaped him. “I’ll tell you one thing—if there are bodies out here they aren’t locals. We’ve got no missing persons reported in Amber Lake.”
“Tamara was taken from the rest area,” Seth reminded him.
“I know, and hopefully she’s the anomaly and really was the third victim in the beginning of this nightmare. Sam fits the profile for a serial killer. He’s about the right age when they begin to kill, he comes from a bad background and he’s pretty much a loner.”
Seth flashed Tom a terse grin. “That could describe half the men I work with at the FBI.” His grin fell as they drew closer to the hand sticking up out of the sand.
It looked odd...the fingers fatter than normal female fingers. “Something’s not right,” he murmured more to himself than to Tom. As he reached an area close enough to lean down and look closer, he cursed beneath his breath and grabbed the hand. It came loose easily from the sand.
“Hey!” Tom yelped in protest.
“It’s not real,” Seth said. He stood up and held out the detached forearm. “It’s a damn prosthesis.”
He stood up and stepped aside, indicating that some of the other deputies complete the dig to see if anything else had been buried there. His mind raced with suppositions. This had been a well-executed trick. Every law enforcement person working for the town was here.
Heart starting to pound an uneven rhythm of fear, he yanked his cell phone from his pocket and quickly punched in Linda’s phone number.
One ring. Pick up, Tamara, he thought urgently. Two rings. He clenched the phone more tightly to his ear. Three rings. Why wasn’t she answering? Four rings and then the click of the answering machine coming on. Linda’s voice filled his ear with her prerecorded announcement to wait for the beep to leave a message.
“Tamara, it’s Seth. Pick up the phone,” he said when the beep had sounded. He was vaguely aware of Tom stepping closer to him. “Tamara, please, pick up the phone.”
The urgency inside Seth grew to mammoth proportions. Where was she? Why wasn’t she answering him? Because the Sandman had fooled them all. Because she wasn’t there to answer the call. She was with the Sandman.
His heart crashed against his ribs in sheer terror. “He bluffed us. He set it up so that all of us would respond to a body in the dunes so he could get to his real target.” Seth could barely keep the tremble from his voice.
“Tamara.” Tom said her name flatly, as if she were already nothing but another tragic victim in a madman’s game.
“Send somebody over to my sister’s house,” Seth said, although he was certain they would find the house empty...Tamara gone.
He didn’t want to leave here. He needed to think. He needed to crawl into the mind of the clever man who had set up such a ruse to obtain his ultimate goal. He desperately needed to figure out if he had Tamara, and, if so, then where was he going with her? And how long did Seth have left to try to save her life?
Seth had to do what he did best, delve into the mind of a killer.
Chapter Fourteen
If Tamara wasn’t certain she was going to die, she might have found her current situation almost peaceful. She couldn’t move, there was no question of somehow escaping or fighting back. And with final resignation all the missing pieces of her memory came rushing back to her.
Steven had been